Religion Dispatches
…US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 servicemen and women and wounded 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, and George Sodini, who killed 3 women and wounded 12 at a Pennsylvania fitness club. Both men had no friends, work issues, difficulties meeting women, and felt victimized—Sodini by women and Hasan by his fellow soldiers for being a Muslim. And both men intended to die. Sodini shot himself before he could be stopped; Hasan seems to have been attempting “sui…
Read More…nsin who began his white supremacist career in the Neo-Nazi underground at Fort Bragg, had a particular hatred for Jews and blacks, in addition to the “dirt people” who made up all non-white groups. And we have heard about the post 9-11 attacks on Sikhs as “rag heads” from the Middle East. But as Jack Mirkinson noted in HuffPo in the wake of the Oak Creek shooting, even news reporters have a hard time getting a “lesser-known” religious tradition r…
Read More
…clock is enough to cast doubt on the veracity of its claims. So what if X number of people say to rescind the invitation? Last I heard, Holy Cross Father John Jenkins was hosting the party. Obviously, this is not simply about a graduation speaker. The President of the United States is being instrumentalized in a long Catholic theo-political struggle that will not be resolved on this playing field, though it is a chance for everyone to show which…
Read More…ents an important lesson on how not to do their homework. According to the Fort Worth Star Telegram Monday, the board voted to ban the children’s book, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, written by Bill Martin Jr. and illustrated by Eric Carle, based on one member’s “research:” In its haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal fo…
Read More…m, it should be noted that neither party has made a significant outreach effort to the Hindu community. Even though a record number of Hindu Americans are running or have run for office this cycle as Democrats, the Democratic Party’s Hindu outreach, as one DNC official admitted to me, is about raising money. What these anecdotes reveal is that both parties have a long way to go before they earn the trust of Hindu voters. That could mean some pain…
Read More…r her headscarf into a courtroom and was subsequently jailed for contempt. Fort Worth, Texas is in the midst of a brouhaha over “Good without God” bus ads put out by local atheists. Some local Christians have responded by following the buses around in a truck that says “I still love you. —God.” Drug cartel violence continues in Mexico, where a gang shootout interrupted a festival for the Virgin of Guadalupe. In other Mexican cartel news, Nazario M…
Read More…e metaphysical liberalism” of the U.F.O. obsessive and cult writer Charles Fort, among other far-flung subjects. Conservative believers “may think this isn’t religion,” said Jon Butler, a Yale University scholar who is working on a history of religion in modern Manhattan. “But religion comes in an incredible number of forms.” The dizzying varieties of American religious experience, scholars say, has roots nearly as deep as old-time religion. At th…
Read More
…There is a universe between the first Mass held west of the Alleghenies at Fort Duquesne in 1754 and the protests organized against U.S. Steel executives who worshiped at the wealthy Shadyside Presbyterian Church in 1985. On the cusp of the century in which the city would build America, and the Pittsburgh Post would gush in 1890 that the whole region was a “cyclorama of the works of God and man.” Gritty Pittsburgh of incandescent beauty, dedicated…
Read More
…ame; or without the consent of the Indians. – Article XVI: 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie All across South Dakota meetings are being held this week and next on the various Lakota Indian reservations to try and raise enough money to make a bid on the purchase of lands in Paha Sapa, the Black Hills of South Dakota, considered sacred to the Lakota people. The site is called Oceti Sakowin, Pe’ Sla (The Heart of Everything) in the Lakota language and i…
Read More
…orist’s ideological lens and become willing to blow themselves up in the effort to pursue the in-group’s mission against the demonized out-group. While this pattern is readily identifiable in the decades of conflict between Israel and Palestine, the United States has been courting a similar one. In its military efforts to disable al Qaeda, the U.S. has succeeded in providing fuel for radical Islam’s rhetoric, with its image of a world divided betw…
Read More